Leonardo Maugeri

Leonardo Maugeri (10 April 1964 – 10 July 2017) was an Italian oil and gas expert, who was a top manager at Eni from 1994 to 2011. At the time of his death, he was Chairman & CEO of Investment firm Romulus Asset Management and a Senior Fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center.

In 2007 Maugeri launched a new strategy for renewable energy. with a new focus on renewable energy and a strategic alliance between Eni and MIT - concluded by Maugeri with the then U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. During his chairmanship of Polimeri Europa Maugeri conceived and engineered (in association with Novamont) the largest green chemistry project in the world – the industrial reconversion of the Porto Torres site. Whereas Eni’s petrochemical activities had been operating at a loss for several decades (630 M€ and 513 M€ in 2008 and 2009 respectively), Maugeri’s strategy of radical discontinuity allowed it to obtain a modest but significant positive cash flow from operating activities (25 M€ in 2011, with losses cut to 71 M€).

Writings Maugeri’s views and predictions have been expressed in a series of articles for several major international newspapers and magazines – including The New York Times, International Herald Tribune (currently International New York Times), Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Science, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The National Interest. In particular, Maugeri is one of the leading supporters of the view according to which the world does not run the risk of running out of oil (See: “Not in Oil’s Name” – Foreign Affairs, July–August 2003 – and “Oil, Never Cry Wolf: Why the Petroleum Age is Far from Over” – Science, 21–27 May 2004), and for this reason he has been attacked on many occasions by proponents of the “peak oil” thesis .

In his book The Age of Oil: the Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource (Praeger, 2006) Maugeri predicted an imminent collapse of oil prices, which occurred in the second half of 2008. In the same book he predicted the development of unconventional oil and gas resources thanks to the advent of new technologies – including hydraulic fracturing. In Beyond the Age of Oil: The Myths, Realities, and Future of Fossil Fuels and Their Alternatives (Praeger, 2010) Maugeri argues that by 2020 a technological breakthrough will shake the solar industry and permanently alter the energy landscape.

Two essays published by Maugeri during his stay at Harvard have sparked a heated debate at the international level. In these essays, Maugeri argues that the incessant growth of global oil production capacity is generally underestimated, and this – combined with modest growth in oil demand – could lead to an oil price collapse in the course of this decade. The second of these studies – “The Shale Oil Boom: A U.S. Phenomenon” (2013), based on an unprecedented analysis of 4,000 shale oil wells, concludes that the United States could become the world's biggest oil producer by 2017. At the same time, however, the study indicates that the shale oil and gas revolution will not be replicable in the rest of the world – let alone in Europe – due to the high drilling intensity required.